While child support calculations have become a matter of routine, the parental determinations, on which they rest, have not. Marriage once served as a system to channel childrearing into two-parent families. Within this system, the marital presumption discouraged efforts to inquire too closely into circumstances that might rebut a husband’s paternity and the stigma against non marital births and divorce eliminated much of the need for such determinations. Today, forty-one percent of American births are non marital and Americans lead the world in family instability. Yet, no comprehensive system has arisen to replace marriage or the marital presumption. This articles reviews the most recent decisions governing parentage, the marital presumption, the use of estoppel to lock in parenthood, liability for child support and the likelihood of continuing disagreement among the states in the allocation of responsibility for children.
Professor Elizabeth Scott, the chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Children and the Law, has often observed that the...
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Scores of lawsuits have pushed retirement plan sponsors to shorter, easier-to-navigate menus, but – as Ian Ayres and Quinn Curtis argue in this work –...
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The recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act is important bipartisan legislation that will protect same-sex marriage should the Supreme Court...
The price of exit influences the terms of intimate relationships—and constitutes an important factor in distinguishing committed from contingent...
In the introduction to her book, Kristin Henning writes: “We live in a society that is uniquely afraid of Black children.” (P. xv.)
The Rage of...
Parentage agreements are proliferating. In a fertility clinic, an egg donor, sperm donor, and gestational surrogate may agree to waive their parental...